'Paradise Logic' Author Sophie Kemp Wants You to Buy Yourself a Steak and a Book

Paradise, a Gowanus punk venue in 28-year-old writer Sophie Kemp's debut novel "Paradise Logic," doesn't exist, but Kemp says it's the bit of the book that's a parallel to her real life. After college, the Schenectady-born author moved to New York City to write for music magazines, and threw herself into the DIY scene.

"I just immediately was like, OK, time to figure out where my people are," she said. They ended up being in the small DIY scene she began to participate in, eventually going to shows "sometimes like five or six nights a week."

In her other life, she was an assistant at Vogue, which was, as she put it, "a really weird sort of dichotomy. I was slumming it in kind of a classic privileged white girl way, and then I was going to my job at a fashion magazine where I was around some of the richest people I've ever met in my whole life."

During the pandemic, while making zines that she described as "little manifestos about what was important to me about art or whatever," she eventually decided to write a book about a 23-year-old woman trying to figure out who she is as she falls into the house music crowd.

Kemp insists that "Paradise Logic" isn't autobiographical, aside from the whole punk venue thing. But it's infused with her experience of the Brooklyn DIY scene of the 2010s, and especially the gender dynamics. While there was a lot of gender equity, "the scene I was in was almost entirely men," she said, adding wryly that "the one little corner of the world that I found happened to be the most male-dominated one that I could have gotten into."

That's something "Paradise Logic's" protagonist, Reality Kahn, also experiences. In the novel, Reality, whom Kemp describes as "naive, robotic and alien," decides to participate in a clinical trial created by a nefarious-seeming doctor to help her become a more perfect girlfriend to Ariel, one of the guys she encounters at Paradise. (Their meet-cute? When Ariel, a hipster NYU professor who recreationally smokes crack, lets Reality out of the bathroom she's locked herself into at Paradise.) Eventually, Reality becomes so fixated on winning his affection, and the affections of other men she meets in New York City, that the book becomes hallucinatory—she begins to see herself as a mythic heroine, on an odyssey to apotheosize via girlfriendhood.

Eventually, Kemp faded out of the DIY scene, becoming obsessed with fiction instead. "I went from someone who read 10 books a year, and would be like, 'I'm going to read Baudrillard or whatever because that will make me seem hot," to reading 50 or 60 books a year in a serious way where I was learning from it." 

These days, she's still out and about, but more in the literary scene. I asked her what's coming up that she's excited about.